3 Mistakes Hotel Owners Make When Managing Online Reputation

Online Reputation Management for Hotels is critical to be successful in the highly competitive travel and entertainment industry. Below will highlight 3 mistakes that hotels owners should avoid in order to boost your hotel’s online reputation, increase the positivity of your online reviews and increase bookings

Mistake #1: Not paying any attention to your hotel’s online reputation at all

Some hotels may not even realize that they should have multiple third-party website listings online. This allows you to claim, monitor, and respond to reviews your customers leave regarding their stay at your hotel.

You need to create or claim your hotel listing on popular third-party listing sites where your hotel is listed or claim your hotel listing.

Examples: Make sure they have a listing and claimed it on Google My Business Page, TripAdvisor, and Facebook Business Page.

You can charge them a one-time fee to handle this “listing creation and claiming” service. To make it easy for you to fulfill – here are step-by-step instructions for each:

How To Create A Google My Business Page for Local Listing

Creating A TripAdvisor Listing

How To Create A Facebook Business Page

This is a great “foot in the door” service you can offer for a low one-time fee. Why?

Because every hotel that needs this service will also be in need of the next two – which offer the possibility of ongoing billing.

Mistake # 2: Not Taking Control Of Guest Reviews

Many hotels will be surprised to discover negative reviews that have been left for them online.

You need to ask them,

“Are you asking your guests to leave positive reviews after their stay?”

“Are you ensuring that you hear about negative feedback BEFORE it gets posted online?”

If they answer NO to either of these questions – you have an opportunity to show them how to take control of guest reviews.

What you need to make sure the hotel owner understands is that guests who have a negative experience are MORE LIKELY to leave a review than those who have had a positive experience.

Because of this, online reviews get skewed towards the negative.

There is a very simple but POWERFUL strategy to reverse this though.

All the hotel has to do is ASK for guests to leave their feedback. You’d be surprised how many don’t even take this step.

Then, they should have a system in place that channels POSITIVE feedback to their online review pages. The system also needs to channel NEGATIVE feedback to their customer service. This way it can be dealt with before it appears online and does damage.

You can then charge them an upfront fee to set this system up, along with an ongoing monthly fee to host and manage such a system for them.

Mistake #3: Not Engaging With Negative Reviews

Once negative reviews get posted online, it is very hard to get them removed – especially on the big hotel review sites like TripAdvisor.

Fortunately, there is one step that can almost INSTANTLY cancel out the effect of a negative review…

RESPONDING TO IT APOLOGETICALLY

You’d be amazed how many hotels do not take this step to minimize the effects of bad online reviews. When a potential customer sees a negative review – but then reads a response by the hotel owner apologizing for the experience and explaining that the issue or issues are being addressed, it quickly mitigates the effect of that review.

Why don’t more hotels do this?

Most hotels don’t have the time or know-how to keep track of all the new reviews that appear about them online, sort through them to find the negative ones, and then respond to them.

Fortunately for you, there is software available that will allow you to AUTOMATICALLY keep track of all new reviews your client receives online and provide you with direct links to the negative ones so your client can quickly respond to them.

This software also allows you to keep track of your client’s overall review score and will show you exactly how many more positive reviews they need to shoot past their competition.

With this software, you can charge hotels a monthly fee to cancel out the effects of negative reviews and increase the online reputation of your hotel and its ratings.

This software is a complete ORM rating-boosting business in a box – and is highly recommended if you are working with hotels.

Additional Options

Keep in mind, online reputation management for hotels is just one service that can help hotels increase their business. Once you are handling a hotels’ ORM, you can also upsell them on additional marketing strategies including…

• Increasing their traffic with SEO, PPC and SEM
• Social Medial Engagement
• Content Publishing to improve their brand image
• Mobile Website development
• SMS marketing
• and more…

We’ll keep you up to date on any new and useful strategies that will help you earn more for your local consulting business. Meanwhile, feel free to contact us anytime with any questions or feedback.